His daughter with filial gaiety assured him that she had waited his orders, to which he replied, “Good girl Sudie.”
During the meal he was as silent as he had been upon the journey, and at the end of it he gave his son-in-law to understand that he desired to talk business with his daughter and preferred to be alone with her: and George Mulross went out, taking his wine with him, for his wife’s father drank none, but only Toxine.
The message Ole Man Benson had to deliver to Sudie was simple enough: there would, for he could not say how long, be no more money forthcoming. He hoped the position might be retrieved; he was confident it would be retrieved before the Fall, by Thanksgiving at latest. Till then, nit!
Sudie had all her father’s readiness; she pointed out to him at once that under the conditions of English politics the total cessation of an income the source of which was familiar to her husband’s friends, would at once affect her father’s credit in future transactions, and clearly showed that no investment could be more to his advantage than the placing of sums at her disposal for the proper up-keep of his daughter’s position in the society of London.
To this powerful argument Theocritus immediately replied that those who looked for hens’ teeth were liable to be stung; that cigars containing explosive matter had been offered him too frequently in the past for him now to entertain the thought of consuming them; and that when he was bulling London he would advise. By which parables he intended to, and did, convey to his daughter his fixed conclusion that it was up to her to bear futures: and lest she should have failed wholly to seize his point, he told her briefly and in the plainest terms that whatever rocks were going were wanted—badly—to sling at something with more dough in it than Mayfair.
With that their brief discourse was ended.
This little conversation over, Demaine was given to understand that he might re-enter the room. He was a little shy in doing so, for interviews of this sort usually meant some new gift or subsidy, but it was shyness of a pleasant sort and he had little doubt that he should hear in a moment the extent or at least the nature of the new bounty which his young household was to receive. He was therefore only puzzled by the novelty of phrasing when his father-in-law, looking at him in a manner rather humorous than severe, remarked:
“Well, I’ve stacked it up with Sudie, and she may stack it up with you.” Then in a kinder tone, he added: “You catch?”
“Yes sir,” said George untruthfully.
“Why then, ’nuff’s said,” concluded the Captain of Industry, and very thoughtfully he picked his teeth with a long fine silver point which he habitually carried in his waistcoat for that purpose of the toilet. “It’s no call ter last long,” he muttered half to himself and half to the bewildered Demaine; “anyhow the pump’s sucking; and there’s no more oil,”—to elucidate which somewhat cryptic phrase Sudie begged her husband not to stand gaping there like a booby, but to sit down and understand as much of it as he could.